OFFICIAL OPENING OF THE STUDENT CENTRE AT MAREEBA STATE HIGH SCHOOL

_{31 July, 2007}

Sign Up for free e-mail updates!

Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen and students and thank you for having me here to officially open this fantastic school facility.

Thank you to your Principal, Mrs Toppin who has made sure this opening is very special.

I know that what has been achieved here has been a result of the Principal, the School Staff and particularly the Parents and Citizens Association and I want to thank Dr Merrilee Frankish for the work the P and C have done. Can I also recognise your local State Member of Parliament, Mrs Rosa-Lee Long, a great advocate for this area, Mr Colin Allan-Waters, the Executive Director of the Education Department up this way, and Councillor Evan McGrath representing the Mareeba Shire Council who I know assisted with this development in many ways.

At the outset, can I congratulate Samara on her rendition of the National Anthem. The way she sang that song and the emotion that she puts into it makes us all very proud to be Australians. Congratulations as well to the school band. Now guys, I don’t know what you are like scholastically, but if all else fails you have a great future as in a symphony orchestra or as rock band somewhere along the line. Now I know that you aren’t allowed to do that today, but the rendition that you gave of The Lord of the Rings was just fabulous. Congratulations.

I want to very much congratulate all of those who have been involved in the construction and initiation of this fantastic Student Centre. I understand that the Commonwealth Government has only played a relatively minor part in this Centre. This whole building cost almost one and a half million dollars, that’s a lot of money, and I am delighted that the Federal Government have been able to provide $1.1 million of that, the State Government $390,000. The money is a relatively unimportant aspect. It is the drive and initiative of your Principal, the staff, the P and C, the Local Council and the Education Department that has achieved what has been achieved here today, and I want to sincerely congratulate all them on their efforts.

It is my pleasant duty here today, on behalf of your Prime Minister, John Howard, and the Federal Minister for Education, Mrs Julie Bishop, to officially open these facilities. While I am here, I would also like to have a look at other improvements that the Federal Government will be funding to the tune of $150,000. Your Rural Operations Teaching Centre and shade structure over sporting courts. They are all part of the Commonwealth Government’s aim to ensure that you receive the very best of education. These facilities all help to achieve your schools vision, which is Building Better Futures Together - and together, we can build a better future for our country and for all of us.

Students, or young men and women I should perhaps say, I hope you are very proud of your school, because you should be. I hope you are very proud of the Mareeba district, the Atherton Tablelands area. I hope, as well, that you are very proud of Australia.

I have been around a while, and I say to you, that as you go through life and meet with people from right across Australia, you will find some of your contemporaries will ask you where you went to school, and when you say you went to Mareeba State High School, they will sort of turn up their noses a bit and say ‘oh yeah’. But let me tell you, you should never be intimidated by that sort of snobbery, as you people have a very great opportunity to achieve greatness, and I know that many from your school have already done this.

I am aware that there are many fine sportsmen and women who have come out of this school, who have won and participated in national and state titles. I am aware that you have been recipients of the Australian Vocational Certificate on many occasions; you have won the State Team Challenge of the Year Award for Community Service and have, from this school, awardees of the very prestigious TJ Ryan Award. This school has already achieved so much.

I hope that you, like me, who come from North Queensland, (I went to school at Ayr State High School, not quite as good as this one I don’t think, it is a bit older), are very proud of your school as I am of my old school and what it did for me and I hope you are as well. I hope that you are very proud of North Queensland and northern Australia. Do you realise that some of the best scientific institutions are based in Northern Queensland. James Cook University, in Cairns and Townsville where I assume many of you will go, has a well deserved world-wide reputation, particularly in the areas of marine science, but generally as well. In the North, we have the Australian Institute of Marine Science and we have several CSIRO agencies, we have the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, just to name a few.

We also have in the sporting area, the Crocs and the Taipans, and (although after last night, perhaps not as proud of them as we were before), our great rugby league team, the Cowboys, who generally do us proud.

In North Queensland, we have much to look forward to. Many of you would have heard about the climate change debate, and I accept as a result of climate change over long period of time, the south of Australia is going to get drier, and North is going to get wetter. That climate change, incidentally, is not Australia’s fault as we exhume less than 1.5% of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gas. But we still have to do something about it, by encouraging the big emitters, the United States, China, Russia and India to curtail their emissions.

Those people who in the future, may sneer at you for having gone to Mareeba State High School, are the people who in years to come will be looking to northern Australia and North Queensland to sustain them - and our country.

There is already a lot of work being done, on the importance of northern Australia and how northern Australia will be able to better look after Australia in the years ahead. We do have the water up here. We do have the lifestyle and the people and we are getting the infrastructure. We need to build upon that and use the assets we have up here to build our country, because in the years ahead it will be northern Australia, Mareeba, and all our towns across the top of Australia that will be principally supporting our country.

At the present time, those of us who live north of the Tropic of Capricorn, constitute only about 6% of Australia’s population and yet already we contribute something like 30%, almost a third of Australia’s export earnings. So you people here, graduating from Mareeba State High School in the years to come, will be leading the charge, and you should be very proud, not only of your school, and your community, but of the fact that you live in the best part of the world. It is a part of the world that will, in the next 50-60 years, in your lifetime, be really be that part of Australia that will contribute to what makes our country.

Students, Ladies and Gentlemen, we do have a great future here, and I am sure you have a great future. I hope that you recognise  and understand the tremendous schooling that you are getting under your Principal, your teachers and with the help of the P and C, you have a big future in front of you and I wish you all the very best. Be proud of your school, proud of your area, and proud of the northern part of the country that we all love.

Students, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am now going to officially declare open these facilities, taking very good note of Mrs Toppin urgings about the need for a Stage - if it was bigger we could have done a dance up here or something - perhaps that is the reason that we don’t have a big stage, but I do take that on board.

On behalf of the Prime Minister, and the Education Minister Julie Bishop, I do officially declare this open, and to do that formally, I will unveil the plaque. I do ask the Principal and Mrs Rosa-Lee Long, representing the State Government which has also contributed money, to join me in the plaque unveiling.

Thank you all very much.

More Speeches